Eat Your Wheatberries

We've been sneaking our wheatberries into places where we'd usually eat rice or quinoa (wheatberry fried rice for lunch yesterday). But I've also been eating them mixed with Greek yogurt, walnuts, and raisins (sometimes with cinnamon and maple syrup), for a better-than-oatmeal breakfast.

As usual, the Internet has more elaborate variations. 101 Cookbooks has a beautiful Wheat Berry Breakfast Bowl, featuring

Thin slices of sautéed pears, ruby-hued cranberries, and plump, golden wheat berries are sweetened with generous dollops of maple-sweetened yogurt and finished with plenty of toasted pecans and a sprinkling of dried persimmons, ginger, and dates.

Food Gourmand has another variation on that recipe, with bananas, mangoes, dried apricots, and cherries. And Eating well makes a hot cereal version that sounds more like standard oatmeal.

Sunday Sweet Potato Samosas

With the extra wrappers from Chinese New Year dim sum and a lazy long weekend before us, we improvised samosas for Sunday dinner. They were meant to be appetizers, but we enjoyed them so much that we didn't quite get around to the leftover-eating that was supposed to be dinner.

Sweet Potato Samosas

Boil peeled sweet potato chunks until very soft.

Meanwhile, cook some finely sliced onion, garlic, and ginger in oil. When the onion is soft, add garam masala (or other Indian spices) to taste, and fry until fragrant.

Add the drained cooked sweet potato chunks to the pan, and stir together until the potato is roughly mashed. Stir in defrosted frozen peas. Add salt and pepper to taste.

Place a small spoonful of samosa filling in the center of a square wonton wrapper. Wet the edges with lightly beaten egg, fold into a triangle, and press the edges to seal.

Deep-fry until delicious-looking. (I would have tried pan-frying or baking these if I were making them myself -- I only deep-fry when I can talk someone else into doing it for me.)

Winter Vegetable Borscht

We had beets, so it was time to make borscht. According to James Meek, this was not without geopolitical implications:

What happens to the food that defines a world when that world vanishes? What happened, in particular, to the dish that was once the common denominator of the Soviet kitchen, the dish that tied together the peasant and the cosmonaut, the high table of the Kremlin and the meanest canteen in the boondocks of the Urals? What happened to the beetroot soup that pumped like a main artery through the kitchens of the east Slav lands? What happened to borshch?

(The full article from the Guardian is worth reading for murder, intrigue, travelogue, etc.)


As usual, we got the basic recipe from Epicurious (Beet and Cabbage Borscht), following the reader suggestions to increase the proportion of vegetables to broth, to omit the tomatoes, to add apple cider vinegar as well as lemon juice, and not puree the soup at the end.

A local blogger's Ukrainian-style borscht recipe gave us the confidence to throw in all our accumulated winter CSA vegetables: beets, potatoes, cabbage, carrots, parsnips, turnips/rutabagas, onions.

(Caution: Housemate Liz insisted to us 1) that she doesn't like borscht, and 2) that borscht is white. These claims seemed so absurd that we were forced to research them. It turns out Liz finds our borscht delectable and that there is a Polish white borscht, which has no beets but which includes such delicious ingredients as "sausage cooking water, fat removed" and hard-boiled eggs.)

P.S. I also made Mark Bittman's whole-wheat muffins with a last, giant, slightly bruised CSA apple to accompany the copious borscht leftovers.

Enigma Sweet Potatoes

These sweet potatoes (served here over CSA arugula and brown rice) were delicious in my lunchbox, but I couldn't quite place the seasoning. The chef was uncooperative when interrogated about the ingredients, though I did get that they were roasted.

Fortunately, Enigma codebreakers, working around the clock, have decrypted the following communique pertaining to Operation: Sweet Potatoes.

... 4 or 5 largish sweet potatoes, half a stick of butter and about that much oil, a teaspoon of liquid smoke, a couple teaspoons of cider vinegar (I think you could double this one -- I couldn't tell if it did anything), cayenne pepper, salt, black pepper to taste ...

It is believed that this intelligence will hasten the replication of the recipe by at least two years.

P.S. The crazies over on the Bitten blog are substituting celeriac for bechamel sauce on lasagna.

Celeriac Recipes

We were flirting in the kitchen by showing off our knowledge of culinary terms the other day. ("You want to make soup, huh? How about we make a mirepoix?") After a digression into French pronunciation, we decided to go ahead with the soup/mirepoix plan, but we didn't have any celery. We did, however, have this.

Celeriac, or celery root, comes from a plant similar to regular celery. Can you use it as a direct substitute for celery in a soup base? I don't know, but we did, which used up one of the four we got in our box this week.

What to do with the rest?

Puree is the most basic recipe: Alton Brown makes a straight-up celeriac puree that is ... pretty much just celeriac. Gourmet adds apples. EatingWell makes it with parsnips and potatoes.

Soup is a common use: Tiny Urban Kitchen has a tasty-looking celeriac-apple-potato soup recipe. FatFree Vegan Kitchen makes a (fat-free vegan) creamy celeriac soup.

NPR calls celeriac "the unsung frog prince of winter vegetables" and suggests a recipe for french-fried celeriac. Less charitably, Gordon Ramsay notes -- with his soup, dauphinoise, and curry recipes -- that "If there was a competition for the world’s ugliest vegetable, celeriac would take first place every time."

(I'm not actually sure what a dauphinoise is, but you can bet I'll be researching it -- and the pronunciation -- for our next go-round in the kitchen. Gourmet does a gratin with potato and Stilton, which I suspect is pretty much the same thing as a dauphinoise.)

What are you making with yours?

Eggplant Off-the-Rails

Last night we were cooking Lebanese lentils and rice and decided we might as well cook our eggplant as a side dish.

I hope no one reading this blog is coming away with the impression that we cook in a deliberate, organized fashion. This is kind of what it's like in our kitchen:

"How about a fried, breaded sort of thing? When I did breaded tofu last week, I dipped the sticks in soy sauce before breading them."
"I don't think soy sauce is Lebanese."
"How about vinegar?"

1. Slice the eggplant into rounds and sprinkle with balsamic vinegar.

"Hey, do you think I should marinate them?" [no answer]
Go fold dish towels for a little bit. "Wow, the eggplant soaked up a whole lot of vinegar."

2. Bread the eggplant in a mixture of breadcrumbs (a lot), chili powder (some), and salt (a little).

"Can I fry these now? Oh, you're using all the burners."
"Put it in the oven?"

3. Bake in the oven at, oh, 375 degrees.

"Did you put any oil on those?"
"Oh, shoot."

4. Remove eggplant from oven and drizzle with olive oil and flip. Check after about 15 minutes.

"They're not getting crispy."

5. Flip and return to the oven for a few minutes, hoping for a different outcome.

"Hey, how about I put them under the broiler?"

6. Broil for a couple minutes. Remove and taste.

"I can't really taste the chili powder. Add cheese?"

7. Flip and grate some parmesan on top. Broil for a couple minutes more, until the cheese is melted and slightly browned.


P.S. Lots of relevant stuff on the Bitten blog recently: Mark Bittman is making a winter citrus salad of oranges and grapefruit that looks delicious. Another writer on the blog seems to be coming with us on the dubiously-authentic winter vegetable curries.

Slow-Roasted Tomatoes

This simple technique is prescribed for "tomatoes that aren't as flavorful as you'd like them to be." It's from an everyday-French-food cookbook manuscript I was logging art for at the office this week. It seemed like a good match for our January tomatoes.

My recipe called for halved cherry or grape tomatoes; I used this week's roma tomatoes, cut into thickish slices. They're spread out on a cookie sheet lined with parchment paper.

The recipe said to sprinkle them with salt, pepper, and olive oil. (I also added a little rosemary.) Then just roast them in a 225-degree oven for three hours.

(Okay, I did a 225-degree oven for two hours, then a warming-to-400 oven for about half an hour more -- I had other things to get going for dinner.)

I ate a lot of them off the cookie sheet, but I'm planning to serve these in a salad with this week's mesclun and beets and some goat cheese.

(If you're fancy, call these tomates confites; here's how a more famous food blogger does them.)